📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Thursday 29 October
His father's Bulgarian citizenship was the way out for a Jewish teenager and his mother after the Anschluss, and the teenager went on to help give the world the Pill. That is Carl Djerassi, born in Vienna on 29 October 1923, and I will admit I knew the name from chemistry long before I knew how Bulgarian his story was.
What happened on this day
Djerassi was born in Vienna, but the household was Sofia's: his father Samuel Djerassi, a Sephardic Jewish dermatologist from Bulgaria, and his mother Alice Friedmann, a dentist and physician from Vienna, had met at the University of Vienna's medical school and settled in Sofia. She lost her Austrian citizenship, became Bulgarian and never learned the language, which some of us will find rather familiar, and she went back to Vienna for two months to have him. After his parents divorced he moved to Vienna with her at five and attended the grammar school Sigmund Freud had attended, spending summers with his father in Bulgaria. Austria refused him citizenship, so he stayed a Bulgarian citizen through his father. After the Anschluss in March 1938 the American visa quota for Austrians was used up, so his father quickly remarried his mother, which gave her Bulgarian citizenship back and let the pair leave for Sofia, narrowly missing the Kristallnacht pogrom a few months later. He spent a year at the American College of Sofia, coming out fluent in English, and in December 1939 he and his mother arrived in America, nearly penniless.
In America he wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, then First Lady, to ask for help, a full scholarship came through the Institute of International Education, and he graduated from Kenyon College summa cum laude before taking a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in 1945. In 1951, working at Syntex in Mexico City, he took part in making norethisterone with Luis Miramontes and George Rosenkranz, a synthetic progestin that, unlike progesterone, still worked when swallowed and was far more potent than the natural hormone. He noted that he had not had birth control in mind when he began, and the nickname "father of the Pill" stuck anyway. Gregory Pincus and Min Chueh Chang first gave the compound to animals as a contraceptive, John Rock to women, and by 1960 the American drug regulator had cleared the Pill for sale. In 1973, with Richard Nixon in the White House, he received the National Medal of Science for that work, though his name was on Nixon's own enemies list, a fact he learned from a newspaper several months later. The left hand, as ever, had not read the right hand's list.
Why this matters for British expats
Bulgarian citizenship reached Djerassi down his father's line, which is how Bulgarian Wikipedia describes the rule of his day, and our Bulgarian citizenship guide covers how it works now. Sofia has not forgotten him: a street in the Natsionalen kinotsentar district is named after him, and the American University in Bulgaria gave him an honorary doctorate in 2013. Shumen does not appear in Djerassi's own story as far as two Wikipedias can tell me, but it does in the wider one. He left in 1939, before the anti-Jewish laws of 1941, and the tidy line about Bulgaria saving its Jews has a second half: about 48,000 Jews in Bulgaria proper were spared deportation, but 11,343 from Bulgarian-occupied Thrace and Macedonia were sent to extermination camps, and in May 1943 Sofia's Jews were expelled to provincial towns, Shumen among them. As for Austria, which refused him citizenship as a boy, it eventually issued him a fresh Austrian passport.
Sources and further reading
The biography here draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry for Carl Djerassi and its English counterpart, which differ usefully on his childhood. The wartime context comes from English Wikipedia's article on the Holocaust in Bulgaria.